Straight Talk: Fama And French Page 1 of 4

Straight Talk: Fama And French

Nouveau indexes, noise and the nonsense of active management
by: Eugene F. Fama and Kenneth R. French
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Few academics have influenced modern portfolio management more than Eugene F. Fama and Kenneth R. French. Their
1992 paper, The Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns (Journal of Finance, June 1992), turned the Capital Assets
Pricing Model (CAPM) on its head and laid out a new explanation for the real source of stock returns.

The paper found that U.S. (and later international) stock returns could be explained by a portfolios exposure to three
factors:

z The market (i.e., beta)

z Size (small caps outperform large caps)
z Value (value stocks outperform growth).

Over time, this three-factor model has proven remarkably accurate, and has spawned a generation of investors (and a
massively successful asset management firm, Dimensional Fund Advisors) that tilts indexed portfolios towards small and
value. And even though traditional, broad-based indexers hate to admit it, those small/value investors have done
pretty well over the past decade.

Journal of Indexes senior editor Matt Hougan spoke with Fama and French recently about the state of the market, the
rise of fundamentally weighted indexes and why investors continue to throw money away on active management.

[Fundamentally weighted indexes] are a triumph of marketing, and not of new ideas.
Eugene F. Fama

Journal of Indexes (JoI): The market has been through some wild rides since you wrote your seminal paper in 1992.
Has anything altered the views you have vis--vis the sources of return in the market?

Kenneth French (French): I dont think so

Eugene Fama (Fama): No, I dont think so.

French: Actually, I take that back. Initially, we thought the value premium was associated with distress risk. Im not so
confident of that any longer.

Whats clear is that the value effect is a catch-all for differences in expected return. Without pernicious assumptions

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about expected growth, any differences in expected return will show up in ratios like book-to-market, earningsto- price,
or cash flow-to-price. Take a company with a high expected return. When you discount its expected future cash flows
back to the present, the high expected return (which is also the discount rate) gives you a low price relative to the
expected cash flows. As long as the fundamental metricthe book value, earnings, etc.is a reasonable proxy for the
expected cash flows, youll also get a low price relative to the current fundamental. This simple discount rate effect
implies that differences in expected return are almost certainly linked to ratios like book-to-market.

Notice that I didnt say why there are differences in expected return; I just said that if there are differences in expected
returns, they will show up in ratios like book-tomarket. That means the value effect is a catch-all that captures any
differences in expected returnwhatever their source.

I think the differences in expected return are the result of an amalgamation of different risks, plus some mis-pricing.
And I dont think we have the technology to distinguish between those two.

Fama: I dont know about the mispricing. I dont know that there is mispricing.

French: There has to be some mispricing. Im certainly not saying its all mispricing. I like to tell people that its 87.38
percent risk.

Fama: I dont know about the mispricing part. I think hes wrong there.

French: To get back to distressed companies the typical high book-to-market company is distressed. But if you hold
book-to-market fixed and you sort companies by financial distress, you dont get much difference in average returns.
So something else is at work.

JoI: A raft of new academic, quasi-academic and fundamentally weighted indexes have come to the market in the
last few years. What are your thoughts on these products? How do they fit or not fit with your research?

French: The academics have been well aware of these issues for 15 years. Its just value vs. growth. Its nothing more
than that. The argument that theyve invented the notion that these measures capture mispricing is ludicrous. Its been
in the academic literature for a long time.

Fama: And there are lots of active money management companies with products that claim to implement these ideas.

JoI: So its just another way of capturing the value premium? French: Its not even another way. Its the same way. I
have a friend who calls it value investing for clients who dont understand ratios.

Fama: Its a triumph of marketing, and not of new ideas. Its a repackaging of old ideas.

JoI: What do you think of the dividend weighting schemes created by WisdomTree and others?

Fama: Thats worse. Of all the measures you can sort by, that one (dividends) produces the weakest value premium.

French: To be fair, what Jeremy Siegel (one of the developers of the WisdomTree indexes) is doing is different. Hes
not ignoring a huge academic literature and claiming he invented the idea of sorting stocks by dividends.

Fama: Well, Im not so sure. He does claim this is a financial revolution. But Bill Sharpe was promoting the idea 20
years ago. And the reality is that only 22 percent of firms pay dividends. What do you do with the rest?

JoI: Have your views on efficient markets changed over the years? Are the markets becoming more efficient with the
increased trading volume, etc.?

Fama: I dont think anybody knows the answer to that. French: Stock returns are too noisy to tell. There may be more
mispricing now or less, but theres no way to show that.

Fama: I think markets have always been efficient.

French: The reason we cant agree is that returns are too noisy to prove inefficiencies exist. I think there are
inefficiencies.

Fama: Well, if you cant measure them, you might as well say they dont exist.

French: The bigger point as it relates to fund management is that Im willing to concede that there is somebody out

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there who can beat the market. But returns are so noisy, I cant figure out who it is. And although I think there are
some mistakes in prices, I think almost all investors lose when they go looking for them.

Fama: People think its a one-sided battle. But active managers can have bad information about the markets just as
easily as good information, and they can come out the worse for it.

JoI: But to broaden the discussion for a moment: One would think that, when the spread widens between growth and
value stocks, investors can better capitalize on the more significant value premium. Do you think investors are able to
use the spread to predict markets? Or to time markets?

Fama: Theres no evidence that that works.

French: Again, its the noise in returns that kills us. Its one thing to do a cross-section test with thousands of stocks
and say that high book-to-market guys have higher returns. But if you want to say that, when the spread in book-to-
market ratios is unusually high, you get an unusually high spread in returns well, youre only dealing with 78 years of
data, so even if that relation exists, returns are so noisy its hard to see it.

Fama: Yes. Differences in expected growth through time would cause the same fluctuations in book-to-market ratios.

French: People just dont appreciate noise. Academics do, but in the practitioner world, people live or die by the next
years return. We have a student whos operating in the real world, and he says its a lot like Russian roulette: he
knows most of his yearly return is determined by luck, but when youre playing Russian roulette, you care a lot about
luck. Over the long haul he expects to win, but in the short run he knows its almost all luck. But thats a Ph.D. from
Chicago. The man on the streetor even a good MBA student has a hard time embracing randomness.

JoI: What do you think about exchange-traded funds (ETFs)? Fama: They can be great for indexes and index
portfolios. I think theyre fine. Ultimately, it comes down to the cost: whether it is more or less expensive to invest via
an ETF or via a mutual fund.

French: As Gene says, it all comes down to costs.

JoI: What do you think of some of the recent product developments in the financial markets? It seems like there are
200 new pseudo-active indexes and ETFs for every one new broad market fund.

Fama: It will be fascinating to find out how and if these new products actually work, but we dont have enough data to
know that yet. It will take a long time for the data to accumulate.

French: One thing that relates to that is the growth of interest in behavioral finance. I have a sense that a little
knowledge is a bad thing here. People read about behavioral finance and believe that it gives them a hunting license to
go out and try to pick winning stocks, or to hire a manager to do it for them. But behavioral finance does not identify
the mistakes in the market. Researchers are simply saying that well investors dont behave rationally, so there
must be mistakes in the market. It doesnt follow that you can find those mistakes and exploit them.

And dont forget, its not even a zero sum game. After fees and expenses, the average investor is going to lose. I think
behavioral finance says more about why investors continue to throw money away on active strategies than it does
about mistakes in prices.

Its the noise that people dont appreciate. They want to draw much stronger conclusions. If it werent for
noise, 98 percent of investors would see whats going on and buy passive strategies.
Kenneth R. French

JoI: Is the value/small premium something that could wildly reverse, or do you believe it is certain or near certain?
What time period/magnitude of reversal would it take for you to rethink your theories?

French: Its never certainthere are all sorts of variation. But over the long-haul, the relation between high expected
returns and low prices is almost sure to hold, and thats going to give you a value effect in expected returns. You can
undo it with pernicious growth assumptions, but the data show that the differences in growth actually go the other way.

One of the things that people often get confused about is the term value. People will say: Values done well, so its
time for growth. What they miss is that there are different stocks in the portfolio each yearif a stock goes up, it

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probably moves out of the value portfolio, and new stocks will replace it.

What I keep coming back to is the fundamental logic: If I have a ratio like book-to-market or earnings-to-price, it picks
up the expected return.

Fama: Another important thing is that were talking about long time frames here. With risk/return, you get high
expected returns because the high risk is there. But there are long periods where those returns do not show up. That is
the nature of risk.

French: Again, its the noise that people dont appreciate. They want to draw much stronger conclusions. If it werent
for noise, 98 percent of investors would see whats going on and buy passive strategies.

JoI: Youve said that momentum is the key challenge to market efficiency, and that you cant explain why momentum
exists in the market. Why cant investors profit from it? Why is it impossible to capture?

French: Its not impossible to capture. But its a high turnover strategy, so the transaction costs associated with it are
substantial. I think you can use the information associated with momentum in some situations. But if you try to set up
a strategy to just exploit momentum, the trading costs will eat your profits.
Fama: It is by definition a high turnover theme.

JoI: Why is active management so persistent? Why do people keep putting money in something that just doesnt seem
to work?

French: Thats what behavioral finance tells us. Peoples perceptions are not consistent with reality.

Biography

Eugene F. Fama is the Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the Graduate School of
Business at the University of Chicago. Considered the father of efficient market theory and the random walk
hypothesis, Fama is among the most frequently cited researchers in the finance industry. He co-authored The Theory
of Finance with Merton H. Miller, who was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. Fama is also the director of
research at Dimensional Fund Advisors, Inc., an investment advisory firm with more than $125 billion under
management.

Kenneth R. French is the Carl E. and Catherine M. Heidt Professor of Finance at the Tuck School of Business,
Dartmouth College. He is the author of numerous articles appearing in the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial
Economics, the Journal of Business, and other publications. Frenchs recent research focuses on empirical estimates of
the cross-section of expected stock returns, the cost of capital, dividend policy, and capital structure. He is President
Elect of the American Finance Association, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and an
Advisory Editor of the Journal of Financial Economics.

URL: http://www.indexuniverse.com/JOI/index.php?id=811

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